2011-03-17

Welcome/Fáilte!

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig! I've started this blog as a companion to my new web site IndigenousTweets.com. Please check out that site, and I hope you'll also subscribe to this blog if you are a speaker of, or are interested in, an indigenous language. I am planning on discussing best practices for developing basic language technologies like keyboards, spell checkers, etc. and I'll also be interviewing people from around the world who are using technology as part of language revitalization efforts.

Project Background
Speakers of indigenous and minority languages around the world are struggling to keep their languages and cultures alive. More and more language groups are turning to the web as a tool for language revitalization, and as a result there are now thousands of people blogging and using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter in their native language. These sites have allowed sometimes-scattered communities to connect and use their languages online in a natural way. Social media have also been important in engaging young people, who are the most important demographic in language revitalization efforts. Together we're breaking down the idea that only global languages like English and French have a place online!

How to use IndigenousTweets.com

The primary aim of IndigenousTweets.com is to help build online language communities through Twitter. We hope that the site makes it easier for speakers of indigenous and minority languages to find each other in the vast sea of English, French, Spanish, and other global languages that dominate Twitter.

The main page lists all of our supported languages (35 as of the launch). Find your language in the table, click on the row, and you will be directed to a new page that lists (up to) the top 500 Twitter users in your language. For instance, here's the page for Ojibwe/Anishinaabemowin. This is meant to be a kind of "menu" of people who tweet in your language whom you might want to follow on Twitter. If you click on someone in the table, it will open a new window or tab with their Twitter profile, so you can see some of their recent tweets and decide if you want to follow them or not. The tables are sortable by any of the columns; this is useful for example if you (like me) only want to follow people who tweet primarily in your language - just sort by the % column. Or you might be interested in the most popular tweeters in your language - in that case, sort by the "Followers" column.

Another feature that I hope people will enjoy is the "Trending Topics" computed by language. Twitter computes their trends based on geography, and so it is unlikely that there would ever be enough tweets in Irish to impact the trends in Ireland, or for Basque tweets to appear in the Spanish trends, and so on. Our Trending Topics are listed on each language page in the right-hand column. If you click a trending topic on IndigenousTweets.com, it will open a search page for that term on Twitter's site.

Finally, if you notice anyone missing from the tables, just enter their Twitter username in the input box on the language page, and they will eventually be added to the table.

Even speakers of languages like Basque and Welsh with vibrant online communities have been surprised to find just how many people there are tweeting in their language. This is the other goal of IndigenousTweets.com: it's a message to the world that says "We are here and we're proud of our languages". For languages with just a few users, I hope it inspires some people to start - make your voice heard!

Thanks

I've gotten help and feedback from a number of people over the past several weeks as this project has taken shape. I'm especially grateful to Jean Came Poulard, Michael Bauer, Keola Donaghy, Boukary Konaté, Adrian Cain, Chris Sheard, and Wim Benes for providing translations of the site into Haitian Creole, Scottish Gaelic, Hawaiian, Bambara, Manx Gaelic, and Frisian. Thanks also to Michael Schade, Edmond Kachale, and Neskie Manuel who provided much-appreciated technical advice and constructive crticism.

IndigenousTweets.com is not affiliated in any way with Twitter, and it was created entirely as a free service to benefit indigenous language communities. Enjoy!

16 comments:

Great idea - thanks!Just two quick questions:1. Is there a way to add languages to your list?2. Presumably, due to status updates on FB not being public like tweets, there isn't an easy way to expand this to FB. Or is there?FYI: I've been FBing in Rangi (Northern TZ, ISO code = lag) for over two-and-a-half years (cf. http://oliverstegen.net/index2.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gid=45&Itemid=99999999) but started tweeting (almost exclusively in English) only a couple of weeks ago.All the best for your continuing effort on behalf of minority languages!Oliver

Hi Oliver - yes it should be easy to add new languages to the list. In the case of Rangi I don't have any text for training the language recognition algorithm, so we'll have to coordinate that by email.

Re: Facebook, they have a similar API so the same thing is possible in theory, but you're right that it would be difficult since most people keep their status updates private.

Congratulations. I'm linguistic's teacher from Chile. I would like that included the language of the Mapuche ethnic: Mapudungun. I have in my TL Twitter followers to speak the language. My username @monicaolivaresf and my e-mail comunicacion.monica@gmail.com My contacts you need to consult.

Hi Philip! There *are* links on every row, they're just a bit hard to find. From the main page, the language names in the first column are live links so you should be able to Ctrl+click or right-click those. And from the language pages, the user image is a live link to the twitter profile. I'll see if I can make that easier in any case.

Ctrl+click and middle-click, even on the language name, still don't work on the main page in Chrome, for some reason (though they do in Firefox). But right-click -> open in new tab works even in Chrome.